MacBook Air now marginally faster, $100 cheaper

Apple has quietly updated their MacBook Air offerings today, bringing a slight change to the system specifications to make the CPU faster, while also dropping the price by $100. At its new price, you can get an 11-inch MacBook Air for as low as $899, making it an even more attractive option for a device of this form factor.

The slight change to system specifications sees the CPU's clock speed boosted by 100 MHz: the standard clock speed for the dual-core Intel 'Haswell' processor is now 1.4 GHz, and the Turbo Boost speed is up to 2.7 GHz. It appears Apple has simply swapped out the Core i5-4250U for the Core i5-4260U, which was recently launched and, apart from clock speeds, is identical to its predecessor.

All other specifications remain the same. The 11.6-inch model features a 1366 x 768 display while the 13.3-inch model has a 1440 x 900 display, and both contain 4 GB of LPDDR3-1600 RAM, up to 512 GB of PCIe-based solid state storage, two USB 3.0 and two Thunderbolt ports, and Wi-Fi 802.11ac.

With the new pricing structure, the base model 11-inch is now $899, while the base model 13-inch is $999. Top-end 11- and 13-inch systems are $1,649 and $1,749 respectively, if you choose to upgrade to a 1.7 GHz Core i7-4650 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB solid state drive.